


Broken Mirror

by alitbitmoody



Category: Atomic Blonde (2017)
Genre: Bisexual Female Character, Bisexual Male Character, Canon Bisexual Character, Central Intelligence Agency, Gen, Ghosts, Historical References, Period-Typical Homophobia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-26
Updated: 2017-12-26
Packaged: 2019-02-21 21:42:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,039
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13152606
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alitbitmoody/pseuds/alitbitmoody
Summary: She doesn't understand why, of all the ghosts that should have followed her after Berlin, the only one that deigns to turn up is David Percival.





	Broken Mirror

**Author's Note:**

  * For [moemachina](https://archiveofourown.org/users/moemachina/gifts).



_July 1990_

If Berlin had been a tinder box waiting for a flung match by the time she landed in country, Lorraine thinks, Kuwait is a ticking time bomb before she even gets there.

Not the nation itself which is beautiful and a great deal warmer than Europe had been. Nor its people who are equally warm, even trapped in a tense, nearly untenable situation. The agents scrambling to anticipate Saddam Hussein and Iraq’s next move – they’re a mess. Many of the local operatives haven't slept in days -- not since the 17th, when the leadership used the anniversary of the revolution to threaten neighboring countries and their oil production -- and their intelligence contacts and handlers look worse. 

Lorraine stands out in this region in a way she never did on either side of the iron curtain. Fortunately, she's there to do little more than to provide a weaponized buttress between the agency's analysts on the ground and the Pentagon. To feed Kurzfeld and the agency's senior leadership positive reports on maneuvers so that their local operatives and support structures can keep doing their work and don't get recalled to the States to speak to the Joint Intelligence Committee or, potentially worse, a Senate hearing. 

Crude saber rattling has a tendency to awaken sleeping giants -- all of the analysts are aware of this. Finding a mid-ground that the upper echelon can take seriously without stirring nightmares of targeted strikes or triggering the kind of surge that makes "mercurial leadership" start training their artillery weapons on their own people is a delicate operation. Lorraine is relieved as ever to be the blunt instrument instead of the velvet glove. 

She stays low, attempts to appear inconspicuous as she accompanies an analyst on an errand from the base to an asset staying in a high rise. Hana, the intelligence operative she's escorting, is fluent in six languages to Lorraine's four and, unlike Lorraine, can sound like a native in all of them.

"Are we sure he's at home?" she asks.

"He has been every other time I've visited," Hana smiles. "Let's just cross our fingers that he hasn't gotten distracted."

"Distracted?"

"Video games. He's gotten to be quite a fan of Nintendo."

Appropriate for a man who has to be careful about just when and how he leaves the house. Lorraine smirks as she pushes the button for the elevator, suddenly aware that they're not alone. She pauses, glances to the side at the young man giving them a hard stare. Lorraine takes in the camo and tan jacket, the rifle and sidearm. Could be an ally, but certainly not friendly. His grim expression takes her back to a stairwell in East Berlin, less than a year ago. She's surreptitiously patting down her pockets for her keys with the spiked fob, her pulse jumping as she prepares to defend her charge against whatever might be coming in the next few seconds--

"Nice day, isn't it?" Hana asks, calm and nonplussed. 

The young soldier nods, lips pursed in vague disapproval, before turning quickly towards the stairwell. She and Hana board the car and push the button for the 30th floor.

_"Not exactly the most welcoming, eh?"_

The statement is enough to make her glance over at Hana, who appears placid as ever. The voice in her head is male, English, and sounds like he's smirking around a cigarette. She punches the button for the thirtieth floor.

\--

Their contact's apartment comes equipped with a full kitchen. Lorraine, being the escort and not the actual operative collecting intelligence, focuses the first ten minutes of the meeting on locating some black tea and putting the kettle on. 

Toren has been in the region for more than twelve years. Before that, he was in Tehran. He's taller than Percival, though not as tall as James, with green eyes and dark curls. He's good with people, particularly civilians. They trust him. She passes him a cup of tea as she sits down next to Hana. 

"Good news or bad news?"

"Depends," he says, launching back into the briefing he just completed for Hana. "Have you got strong opinions on the coast?"

"I prefer desert to beaches," Lorraine answers, dryly.

"Curious," he observes, tone flat and devoid of humor. "Most people like the opposite."

 _"Most people are idiots."_ The voice is still smirking and smoking. She ignores it. 

"Well the good news is the border is inland -- desert, not beach. That's the last of the good news, I'm afraid."

As suspected, Iraq's leadership is unmoved by Kuwait's pledge to cut oil production and help OPEC drive the price back down. They have received intelligence that the Iraqi army is going to begin deploying troops to the border shortly and the oil fields a few miles inland are at risk. 

"And the time frame?" she asks.

"It's going to be days not weeks," Toren tells her. 

Bad news, indeed.

\--

Sleep has never been much of an issue for Lorraine -- the lack of it, or the intermittent spurts. She drifts in, she drifts out. On each mission, she's learned to hold her breath until the final extraction point, always focusing on the objective. In Berlin, she had held her breath for what seemed like a lifetime. Being much more short-term, it should be easy to drift here. But it isn't.

She stares at the bowed ceiling of her room, counting back from 100 by sevens.

_"Jesus fuck how the hell did you get this assignment? I would have thought you would have earned some vacation time by now."_

93...86...79...

_“No tea with your queen either, I take it? Oh that's right, I forgot. He doesn’t take tea with people like you. Deviant behavior, pernicious carriers of disease et cetera and so forth.”_

72...65... She turns her head to stare at the window shade instead. 

_“Not that you care, that is. Being a good patriot does mean letting certain loyalties and affiliations... slip. Though it does surprise me that you wouldn’t renounce yourself altogether, particularly in the field, in a country where getting caught often gets you a one-on-one beat down with a Stasi officer.”_

That had been the advice passed on to her, from both sides of the Atlantic. The Kremlin hadn't deigned to advise her on the matter at all. 

“I take it that you had your share?” she asks, rubbing her eyes.

One way to tell if this is a proper delusion — interaction. If Percival answers her, the chances that this is a simple auditory hallucination brought on by sleep deprivation disappear. If he persists in answering, then it's a matter of contacting Langley about scheduling another evaluation and, potentially, Kurzfeld grounding her for good.

 _“The winters are cold in Berlin,”_ he replies, a hint of a smirk there. _“Bed down with whoever keeps you the warmest and if it attracts local law enforcement, consider it bait for the trap. One more asset for your network.”_

Damn.

One possible theory is that she read this in his file somewhere, or is mentally filling in a blank from a story James told her.

Or there’s no delusion and this is still one more part of a chaotic fractious reality she’s taken care to reconcile herself with for the better part of a decade. And, somewhere, that reconciliation is withering.

“And yet, you were ready to take tea," she posits.

_“With the Queen, yes. With Thatcher? They would have needed to take all my weapons away from me for that one.”_

“I believe time may be catching up with her anyway," she hums, noncommittally. "Your country is still largely a male establishment hiding behind chauvinism to disguise utter mediocrity — her mistake was in not leaving the door open behind her for anyone that won’t call her a sad, old woman when the opportunity strikes.”

_“I knew I liked you.”_

“You’re not really here.”

 _“Aren’t I?"_ he asks, not a hint of laughter or his tone this time. _"Than why are you talking to me?”_

\--

The bad news gets worse around the time 750 tanks and 700 artillery pieces turn up at the border. Someone who is not Lorraine takes the time to count them and relay the information to the agency.

The UN issues their ultimatum to the Iraqi leadership -- complete withdrawal or else. Hussein's silence is all they need to pull the trigger. 

And yet it's not. Not initially. So Lorraine and the rest of the agents stay put, awaiting further instructions.

_"Do you suppose they've got performance anxiety? I've always been led to believe that that's not exactly an issue for Americans. You're usually eager and precipitate..."_

She wonders, not for the first time, why it's the specter of Percival who has chosen to plague her in this delicate time. Delphine would have brought comfort. James would have brought recrimination and understanding. Percival brings none of those things -- he simply lingers at her shoulder, commenting and failing to say anything of substance, like the world's most irritating, invisible parrot. 

_"Another day, another cock fight."_

And if this is her brain misfiring, why did it choose him over everyone else?

\--

"Get Toren out." Kurzfeld's voice brooks no argument. "We've got credentials for him. He's headed to Washington."

"And his assets?" she asks.

"If you can get them. We'll iron out their documentation later."

 _"Always later. Why is it always 'later?'"_ Percival wonders quite loudly in her ear. 

\--

In the end, Kurzfeld's hesitation makes no difference. Toren's assets were across the border the night before the invasion and are already in the wind. Their own lack of hesitation is particularly insightful -- they're the ones who have been warning American intelligence about coming danger for weeks, after all, not the other way around. 

While less difficult, getting Toren out alone (without his Nintendo) -- while not as harrowing as springing a defecting communist agent from a crumbling Berlin -- is no picnic. Lorraine partners with Hana and the three of them run at nightfall -- not quite the cover of darkness, not with the fires from the oil fields burning a red orange sky in the distance. 

A military transport gets them to the coast, a coalition ship and, if they're not blown out of the water before morning, home free. 

Toren and Hana are boneless and unwound by the time they hit the water. Lorraine remains vertical and alert, even seated. She manages sleep in five-minute intervals, giving the illusion of an interminably slow blink, prompting a speculative whisper from more than one member of their military escort ("reptile" one of them mumbles, "robot" says another). 

After what seems like minutes and is probably hours, she opens her eyes to see a slight male figure, clad in a Stasi officer's coat seated across from her.

 _"Olly olly oxen free."_ David Percival smiles, face unshaven and teeth unbrushed, even in death. 

Visual hallucinations, now. It's a very good thing they're headed back to Langley. She makes a mental note to pencil in that appointment.

"Not hardly," she murmurs. "You're still here. Why are you still here?"

 _"Don't ask me. I didn't buy the ticket. And even if I could, I have to say you're not exactly my first choice. I was under the impression this whole 'life after death' nonsense came with a change of scenery,"_ he puffs on a cigarette, smokelessly, exhaling nothing even as the ash on the end gives the illusion of burning. _"Which I could definitely use."_

"Really."

_"Perhaps you could, too. Maybe that's why I'm here."_

"You're not exactly a change."

_"No, but I'm the one you want. What do you suppose that's about?"_

Lorraine shakes her head. Her brain has always rebelled against poetic and literary analogy, tamped down with efficiency, precise and cold. The reason why, on balance, may not matter. Particularly if this is indeed a simple matter of synapses misfiring.

It could, she supposes, be her psyche re-tuning its pattern recognition, picking out details that mirror her own situation -- present and past, picking out reflections in a mirror shattered by the cessation of lives and nations. Looking for meaning where there is none. 

"Another day, another cock fight" actually sums it up quite nicely. 

She doesn't realize she's spoke aloud until Percival starts cackling.

**Author's Note:**

> I missed the initial deadline to submit this for Yuletide and it may need another edit, but wanted to make sure it was wrapped up and posted for the reader in time for the end of the holiday. I hope they like it.
> 
> The majority of the historical references came from the articles and timelines listed in the index. 
> 
> Index:  
> https://www.cia.gov/library/reports/general-reports-1/gulfwar/061997/support.htm  
> https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/DOC_0005336540.pdf  
> https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1992/04/28/cia-shared-data-with-iraq-until-kuwait-invasion/2d4684e5-0a62-4697-933a-d3bf9107701e/?utm_term=.1f2bfc1ff7cb


End file.
